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Storytelling provides an ideal context for active child participation and parent–child interaction and fosters children’s vocabulary development (Mol et al., 2008; Whitehurst et al., 1988). Next to traditional picture books, wordless picture books enhance storytelling (Ramos & Ramos, 2011). Wordless picture books elicit active participation as parent and child create a story together (Bosh & Durán, 2009). They discuss the relationship between pictures and uncover the story line by encountering different characters and their problems (Dimino, Taylor, & Gersten, 1995). A wordless picture book includes connections between story components and provides background information to create a meaningful storyline (Peterson, 1994). When parent and child engage in storytelling supported by a wordless picture book, they are likely to engage in contextualized parent–child interaction defining the characters and settings. This context also generates decontextualized interaction as the pictures need to be interconnected to create a story.

However, creating a meaningful story requires extensive skills of the parent. The parent needs to ask questions, provide feedback and stimulate the child to actively participate in story creation (Vygotsky, 1978; Zevenbergen et al., 2003). As was reported earlier, these skills may not be evident in all parents. A way to help parents during storytelling is through real-time interaction support. Recent research demonstrates that specific design principles and prompts in technology-enhanced activities enhance parent–child interaction (Gremmen et al., 2016) and children’s vocabulary (Takacs, Swart, & Bus, 2015). Within the storytelling context, Gremmen et al. (2016) conducted a study with a digital elaboration image that included visual and textual prompts (i.e. zoom elements and open-ended questions) for rich parent–child interaction and story construction. Results showed that the prompts enhanced decontextualized parent–child interaction and resulted in higher vocabulary gains compared with a paper condition without prompts.

Korat, Shamir, and Heibal (2013) concluded that parent–child interaction during e-book reading with visual prompts (dynamic visuals and hotspots),

auditory prompts (music effects) and textual prompts (highlighted written phrases) encouraged decontextualized language such as sharing personal experiences. In a similar vein, Fisch, Shulman, Akerman, and Levin (2002) showed that including visual prompts, such as choice points that ask users to direct the storyline, encouraged parents’ and children’s decontextualized language such as making predictions about the story. In contrast, a study of Parish-Morris, Mahajan, Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff and Collins (2013) showed that digital prompts can also distract from story content when they are not congruent with the storyline. Electronic console books with visual and auditory prompts (i.e. puzzles, games, songs and word repetitions) caused interruptions, mid-sentence pauses and other distractions that were detrimental to parent– child interaction quality.

Thus, there is evidence that visual, auditory and textual prompts can support interaction, as long as they are congruent with the story and do not distract from story content or hinder active participation. This was confirmed in a recent meta-analysis on effects of TES on children’s vocabularies. Takacs et al. (2015) conclude that multimedia features like animated pictures, music and sound effects were beneficial for children’s productive vocabulary and story comprehension, whereas interactive elements like hotspots, games and dictionaries were not.

Another design principle of TES is giving parents and children control of story content and story pace, to encourage active participation and high-quality parent–child interaction. Within the context of shared electronic book (e-book) reading, several studies showed the importance of parents and children being in control of the course of the story. When being in control of the story course, children were more actively participating in story construction (Fisch et al., 2002). In line with this, Kim and Anderson (2008) showed that giving parent and child control of pace the story resulted in more interaction compared with a closed format in which pages were turned automatically. Moreover, they showed that e-books with a voice-over served more as listening materials and involved fewer verbal interactions about the story. A voice over hinders active participation and story creation of parent and child. Therefore, we propose to provide a storytelling format in which parent and child tell the story themselves, and, following previous research, are in control of the story line and story pace, and are guided by prompts that are contingent with the storyline.

Elaborating on the discussed literature, we developed the TES activity Jeffy’s Journey. In Jeffy’s Journey, the format of shared wordless picture book is integrated because this has proven to stimulate active participation of the

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meaningful story requires extensive skills of the parent, technology was used to support the storytelling process. In the first place, Jeffy’s Journey followed three design principles to support the creation of a meaningful story. First, Jeffy’s Journey consisted of storytelling phases, to know, an introduction story, avatar selection and a story creation phase (further explained in the method section). In these phases, the structural elements of a meaningful story (a problem, characters and the relation between events) were outlined (Dimino et al., 1995). Providing the structure of the story was shown to be helpful for creating a meaningful and coherent story (Harris & Schroeder, 2012).

The second design principle was parents and children being in control of the storyline. They could create their own story following the pictures in the introduction story, and they could select the characters of the story in the story creation phase. Following Kim and Anderson (2008), there was no digital narrator or digital voice-over so that dyads could determine the course and pace of the story themselves. As a third principle, we included explicit turn regulation, that is to say, parent and child alternately determined the course of the story by selecting characters. This was included to enforce well balanced participation of parent and child, and also to prevent a conflict about who was in control of the screen. Turn taking during a technology-enhanced activity facilitates verbal interaction between preschool children (Therrien & Light, 2016), and we assumed the same would hold for parent–child dyads.

In addition to these principles, prompts were added with the purpose to enrich parent–child interaction around the storyline. Visual, auditory and textual prompts corresponding to the storyline were shown to enhance parent–child interaction (Gremmen et al., 2016; Korat et al., 2013). Therefore, prompts such as visual changes, word pronunciations and open-ended question were included to foster contextualized and decontextualized language. In line with the second control principle, prompts were not offered automatically, but parent and child were in control of their implementation. In sum, we assumed that providing a structured storytelling activity accompanied with visual, auditory and textual storytelling prompts would result in active and meaningful storytelling with high-quality parent–child interaction.